Complex and compound sentences in English-Arabic translation

Abstract EN

Complex and Compound are two sentence types containing syntactic features that are employed in writing in both English and Arabic.

It is often argued, however, that the two languages differ in their preference for either syntactic relation (Cf.

Introduction and Note 3).

English, it is said, makes use of more subordination than coordination, while Arabic favors the use of coordination rather than subordination.

The present paper aims not to prove or disprove this claim.

Its main focus is finding out how these syntactic relations are dealt with in English-Arabic translation in general.

To achieve this aim, the research makes use of three types of corpus : Texts originally written in English, texts originally written in Arabic, and texts translated from English into Arabic.

The texts surveyed are taken from different disciplines.

The reason behind this is that the researcher wants to get to a generalization about the hypothesis above, whether it is proven valid or not.

In other words, by varying the texts, the researcher wants to get to general remarks from which several researches could be triggered.

In each of the texts at hand, the instances of subordination and were counted.

The number of occurrences was then turned into ratios and coordination the results of the three parts of the corpus were compared so as to know whether the translated texts are more like those originally written in English or those originally written in Arabic.

Recommendations conclude the paper.